Diogenes

Anyone can boost, if Sonic Team decides they can; the problem is that the boost gameplay doesn't accommodate a lot of the other abilities that other characters have. They can stick a character like Shadow in as a skin if they want (which they did, with Forces) but there are other issues that need to be dealt with for other characters.

Tom is there for parents to empathize with as he deals with a small, annoying, hyperactive person.

Sonic fights Robotnik while a useless human stands around isn't fresh.

I don't think it's that big a deal. Aside from a small number of posts that were kind of in poor taste for reasons unrelated to Sonic, nothing the twitter posts can hurt the series's reputation anywhere near as bad as the games have already done. '06 jokes were old hat long before the twitter got to them. Mocking the series in general was common long before the twitter ever dared make such a joke. And nothing they've said has even been a fraction as vicious as the more critical parts of the fanbase, or some people outside of it. I'm not saying "06 is bad, lol" is any kind of clever joke, but it can't possibly make the series look worse because the game was already infamous. And I don't even think they make these sort of jokes all that much these days anyway. And as far as them not taking shots at other bad Sonic games...06 is just in the perfect position to let them get away with it, where they couldn't with most other games. It's, as said, infamous already, so 99% of the audience agrees rather than feels slighted, and it's old enough to be part of an entirely separate era of the series, unlike if they were mocking Forces or something as it was being sold. What's going to change the series' reputation for the better isn't cutting out self deprecating jokes, but the games (and other products) actually getting better. I genuinely think most people who care at all want to like Sonic, even with as much shit as the series gets. When something good comes out, it gets positive attention, it doesn't just get swarmed with "lol 06, lol ShtH, lol RoL" comments save for the few people who would never be convinced anyway. But when we get a dud like Forces, there's really not anything a social media account can do to stop people from slipping back into "yep, Sonic sucks again" mode. They're basically the tiniest little side branch of "official" Sonic content just trying to keep some kind of attention on a series that regularly sabotages itself on a massive scale.

The Adventure games had more problems than poor collision detection and low polygon counts. Stronger hardware doesn't fix bad design, as the rest of the series demonstrates.

There's several reasons at this point. The backlash towards the overload of characters and their poorly designed gameplay that reached its height in the Heroes-'06 period. Modern Sonic Team struggling to put out a finished, polished game with even just one playable character leaves little room to develop others. Some characters (most notably Tails and Knuckles) being hard to adapt into 3D due to how their unique abilities can break levels. The boost gameplay's laser-focus on speed makes it even harder to fit less speed-focused characters in coherently. Probably other things as well.

That's...not really how it works. A character can be playable and have basically no bearing on the story; a character can be non-playable and be absolutely vital.

Well, we do see the Egg Carrier flying towards Angel Island. We don't know how he broke the emerald but it's a fair guess that he did, somehow, if only because there's no other reason it should suddenly break.

I really don't see how they could make the jump to Shadow being hated and feared by humanity after ShtH went so far in heaping praise on him. The president considers him a big enough hero that he had a photo of him on his desk, and the GUN Commander, the one guy who kind of has an actual reason to hate him and the authority/power to do something about it, ends up on his side as well. And it's not as if Shadow does or (at least on the surface) is anything that people would fear; nobody's bothered by Sonic running around smashing robots. The whole thing just rings entirely hollow to me. It's a stock plot hook for any "unnatural" character but we've already seen the universe contort itself to Shadow's favor. I guess maybe the one thing that could work is if it's an unfounded fear, and they use it to explore how Shadow feels about his own identity, but that's more personal than this series usually goes, ShtH was already supposed to be about him coming to terms with his identity anyway, and I honestly have seen enough Shadow angst for one lifetime.

Watch/read Dorohedoro. It's grimy and gory and goofy and you will come to love every last one of its weird murderous characters.

Maybe just try not to make a part of the game that a lot of people will have to groan and force themselves through if they actually want to get to the end. It doesn't have to be all completely sanitized Sonic-only gameplay but when a game goes so far off course that speedy platforming has been replaced with a fishing sim and people still hate it 20 years later maybe it was just a bad idea.

I'd say Big's gameplay is a bigger departure from the rest of SA than special stages usually are from the games they're in (though admittedly there is less of him to grind through). Plus SA is much more story-driven than most games that require finishing special stages to see the end; if you skip Big you're not just missing out on a boss fight and a congratulations screen, you're missing the conclusion that ties all of the stories together and properly resolves the loose ends. You can beat 3&K emeraldless and live without seeing Doomsday Zone, but playing SA and never finding out how they deal with that bigass city-destroying water dragon from the intro is bound to be unsatisfying.

He's allowed to run around naked in public, too, and that's considered a bit of a faux pas for humans. Honestly I just think it's boring to treat Sonic like he's just a funny looking human. He's a hedgehog; an anthropomorphic one, sure, but if you eliminate all distinction between Sonic anthros and humans there hardly seems to be a point in having both. And it's not like he's any less of a funny looking human if he comes from another world rather than from an island somewhere on Earth.

And all this time I thought he was supposed to be a hedgehog.

Well yeah Chaos can't teleport across dimensions or anything, it can only destroy the one world that it's in.

"Too much Fire Emblem" has been a running complaint at least since Smash 4, though, and Corrin still gets hate for basically being in the same position Byleth is now. Plus the rest of the pass was all surprising third party additions, so Byleth sticks out like a sore thumb. It should've been immediately obvious that this would be divisive, at the least.

Why not put them in the middle, then. Two hype characters at the start to draw in early adopters, two hype characters at the end for a strong finish to pull in the stragglers. Start strong, end strong, if there's got to be a lull, put it in the middle.

He's an eccentric genius that they bring in out of desperation, he's not working with standardized military technology, there is no reason his machines have to be boring and generic.

Even if they insisted on making it an origin story, there's any number of ways they could've written him, they weren't locked into this specific interpretation.

Everybody's sick of Green Hill.

Personally I would've rather they got Eggman's sense of style right the first time instead of having bland robots in the one movie we know will be made and waiting until unlikely hypothetical sequels to give them actual personality and appeal.